The Homebrewer’s Brain – Nut Brown Ale

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In my opinion, most beer styles of English origin have been vastly improved by “new world” brewers (there are obvious exceptions). By which I mean, ‘Merica is better. It should be said that, in almost all cases, the English examples that I have sampled and am basing this opinion on are mass marketed beers by macro English breweries. I’ve never been to England and there are very few, if any, English craft breweries that distribute to Western Washington. I can only assume that the English craft breweries make much better products than those I’m used to seeing and drinking. But, I still think it’s safe to say that Americanized versions are much less boring in comparison, mostly due to the types of hops that American brewers have available to them. Old world hops are often much more subdued in alpha content and aromatics. I also have a feeling that American brewers have a vaster array of yeast strains and specialty grains available to them but that is a wild assumption.

I get that a lot of English ales are designed to be what we now call in America “session beers”. That’s all well and good. I like sessionable beers just fine, but I like them to have flavor. This is possible. A near humorous example is the English style dubbed “mild”. There it is, right in the name. I don’t see how I could get excited about anything called a mild, beer or not. Just so that I’m not completely bashing the Brits, I will say that they get a ton of respect from me for making it tradition to serve beers at a warmer temperature that what is considered standard in America. It’s a scientific fact that ice cold beer numbs the taste buds.

So, I’ve decided to create a brown ale recipe. This is, traditionally, a British style. I guess, at this point, it goes without saying that I don’t want it to be like a traditional British brown. I’m not trying to go high alcohol and I don’t even want it to be super hop forward, but I do want it to be robust and flavorful. I want it to have a smooth mouthfeel and I want it to have a complex malt profile full of nut and biscuit notes.

According to a lot of recipes I’ve seen, the BJCP Style Guidelines, and the fantastic book Designing Great Beer by Ray Daniels, it’s pretty much standard that the majority of brown ales get their color from a variety of crystal malts and a small amount of chocolate malt. I’m happy with that, but I don’t plan to stop there. I want to go heavy on the biscuit/toasted malts and use a good portion of Munich. I’m essentially going to make a pretty simplistic style not so simplistic.

I want to keep my base grains at or around 80% of the total mash to minimize astringency. Of that I’ll use about 75% British Pale since it has a bit more color and malt flavor than American 2-row and 25% Munich.

For specialty grains I want to pretty much use every grain available to me that has any semblance of nuttiness. This turns out to be victory, special roast, amber, and British brown. Beyond that, I want to achieve a SRM between 20 and 30. I’m fine with using chocolate to some degree, so I’ll go with the darkest chocolate malt I can find. Since crystal malts are also used in a large majority of brown ale recipes, and I still need to get my color up, I’ll use some crystal rye and special b. It worked out that, in order to fit all 7 (!) of these specialty grains into 20% of the entire grain bill I can do equal parts of each (which amounts to 4oz each) in a 5 gallon batch.

Another variation on brown ales that came to mind is honey brown. I thought about putting some honey malt or actual honey into this beer, simply for added complexity, but that seemed too normal. This beer is anything but normal so I decided to try agave nectar instead of honey. As I mentioned before, I don’t want this beer to be extremely boozy, so I’m only going to add 8oz of agave at flame out. This may not even come through in the flavor, considering the plethora of bold specialty grains, but I’ve wanted to try it in a recipe for a while now so…there it is.

Excluding the agave, I have a total of 10 pounds of grain in this recipe (5 gallon). That will put my O.G. at 1.057. I’ll be using Wyeast American Ale II for my yeast since it also contributes a nutty flavor. American Ale II has 74% attenuation. That, coupled with the specialty grains I’m using, should give me a final gravity around 1.015 which is about perfect in my opinion. I’d be happy with anything between 1.012 and 1.016. I’ll also plan to mash high – around 154/156 degrees. Like I said, I want this beer to have some legitimate body and residual sweetness. This will be a desert of a brown ale. It might even resemble a lightly colored old ale in more ways than one.

This is a malt forward beer so the hops are almost not worth contemplating. I’ve decided to use crystal leaf simply because I have a ton of them right now. I’ll just do two additions of this 3.5% alpha hop and shoot for an IBU in the low 20s. 1.5 oz at 60 minutes and 1 oz at 10 minutes gives me 23.1 IBUs. Done.